by Cara Bastone
To her surprise, he took another step backward. Any farther from her and he’d be ringing her neighbor’s doorbell with his tookus.
“No.” He shook his head. “Nuh-uh. I’m staying right here.”
Now he wasn’t the only one feeling bamboozled. She put her hands on her hips, drawing her brow. “Someone’s feeling particularly obstinate today.”
“No. This isn’t obstinance.” His voice, in order to reach her across the hall, was a touch louder than it should have been in her normally quiet hallway. “I—If I’m the one who kissed you then I’m sure as hell not barging into your house and demanding information from you. I’ll demand information from you out here in the hallway where you can slam the door in my face if you want.”
He...was giving her an out. He’d come all the way over to her house for answers but wasn’t going to push her for said answers. He was shouting to her across the hall so that he wouldn’t crowd her. How ridiculous. How Tyler. Her heart flipped back over, but somehow she didn’t think it had landed back in quite the right place.
“Let me get this straight,” she said slowly, still leaning in her doorway, her arms crossed and one foot balancing on the other. “You’re yelling about our personal business in my hallway, in front of my neighbor’s door, in order to make me more comfortable?”
He let out an adorably exasperated huff, tugging a hand through his floppy hair again and making it stand up straight for just a moment before it flopped right back down. “Well, when you put it that way.”
She couldn’t help but laugh. She’d never seen him so flustered and she kind of loved it.
“Tyler, come into my house. I promise I’ll have no problem kicking you out if I want you to leave, all right? You don’t have to worry about crowding me.”
A reluctant expression on his face, he seemed to weigh his options out there on her neighbor’s doormat. After a moment, he sighed and then walked into her apartment, sliding his shoes off and hanging up his coat. He wore a V-neck sweater and slacks, and even with that ornery expression on his face, looked like he’d just come from a shoot for some business-casual magazine. His picture would be featured over an article entitled: “From Boating to Business, 8 Pairs of Loafers That Can Do It All.”
She closed the door and when she turned back to him, he was looking at her, really looking, and the ornery expression had faded.
“What?” she asked, trying to decipher that helplessly pained look he was wearing.
“You have a ponytail.”
“Oh.” She put her hand up to the high hair tie and fiddled around with it. “I was just going to do some cleaning when you stopped by.”
He looked away from her hair, his eyes bottoming out on her yoga pants, and his expression got even more pained. He jammed his hands into his pockets and turned away from her, going to sit down in the armchair on the far side of the room.
She took a moment to get some iced tea for each of them and then joined him in the living room, sitting cross-legged on the couch and leaning forward over her knees.
“Please,” he said after a moment, dragging his hands through his hair again. “Please, just put me out of my misery and answer my question.”
She fixed him with a stare and spoke slowly. He was extremely hard for her to read right now and getting harder by the moment. “You want to know who kissed who.”
“Yeah,” he said gruffly, dropping his hands from his face. “I do.”
“Who do you think kissed who?”
“Fin!”
She laughed. “All right, all right. I don’t know, Ty. We kissed each other.”
He screwed up his face in frustration.
“That can’t be true. It’s never true,” he insisted. “That’s like when people say a breakup was mutual. It’s never real.”
She rolled her eyes. “Of course those things can be real. Rare, maybe, but real. Ty, did you want to kiss me last night in your kitchen? Did you lean in?”
He cleared his throat and slanted a look at her with those navy blues of his. “Yes.”
Her heart feebly attempted to get back into its normal position and grotesquely failed. She took a steadying breath. “Okay, then. There’s your answer. We kissed each other.”
“So.” He stopped, leaned forward over his knees and attempted to brush his hair down as he stared at the floor. “You leaned in too.”
She balanced her chin on one fist. “Considering it was this side of twelve hours ago I was literally sucking on your lip, I’m not sure how much clearer I can make this, Tyler.”
He stood and paced to the far side of the living room, absently touching the rainbow-making baubles that hung in her window. “Okay. Okay, so I kissed you and you kissed me.”
“You know when you say a word over and over again and it starts to lose its meaning?” she asked dryly, her chin still on her fist. “Kisskisskisskisskiss. Doesn’t mean anything anymore.”
He turned from the window, his face serious, his voice low. “It meant something to me, Fin.”
Her blood did that backward thing again. “I can see that,” she said in a voice equally low. And she could see it. She’d never seen his energy so chaotic. So out of whack. He was scrambling as fast as he could, trying to make sense out of their kiss while also trying not to ruin everything. She rubbed a hand over her breastbone, trying to make her heart settle back into its normal position, but she just couldn’t make it go.
“Okay,” he said again. “Okay. Normally, I’m a see-how-it-all-turns-out kinda guy. But I’ve got Kylie and that’s hard enough even when I’ve got my head on straight. So, I’ve got a few things to say, I guess.” He strode back over to the armchair and plunked down in it, rubbing the palms of his hands over the knees of his slacks. When he looked up at her, there was something in those navy eyes of his that she hadn’t seen since that day at the ball game.
“Look,” he said. “It’s obviously no secret that I used to have a big thing for you. And it’s not like I’m at home writing your name in my diary or anything. But still. You’ve helped me out so much with Kylie. I honestly don’t know what I would have done without you these last few months. And... God, I can’t believe I’m saying this to Serafine St. Romain.” He tossed his eyes to the ceiling for a moment but then they were back on her, more confident than they’d been out in the hallway. “But that—last night—it meant something to me. And confused the hell out of me. And if it didn’t—doesn’t—mean anything to you, then we can’t do it again. Okay?”
Fin, sitting on the couch, her chin on her fist, let her eyes drop for the first time since they’d sat down in the living room. She felt chastened, and a little silly, and extremely humbled. Here she was, making wry jokes, deleting texts to him, dancing around her feelings. And there he was. In person. Admitting how he felt. Asking questions. Being honest.
She suddenly felt like a cad of the first degree. Protecting oneself from actual harm was one thing, and she’d had to do that a thousand times in her life, warning off men on the street, blocking people on the internet, that kind of thing. But this? This dance she was doing with Tyler right now was simply protection as habit. It was a hard-worn groove in her internal hardwood floors and she was walking it simply because that was what she knew how to do. Meanwhile, he, for the second time, was putting himself right out there. Even after the first time he’d done it she’d eviscerated him like a pasture-raised chicken carved up for market.
This right here, staring at her in a V-neck and slacks, was what bravery looked like. This was what it looked like to ask for what you needed. And, damn, it looked good.
Fin found herself looking at her own hands folded in her lap, her thumbs playing an in-house thumb war tourney.
What’s it gonna be, Finny? She was surprised by the voice she heard then. It wasn’t her own intuition. No. That was Jetty’s voice. Challenging Fin, knowing just how good she cou
ld be if she tried.
What’s it gonna be?
“And if it did mean something to me?” she said quietly, and forced her eyes up to his. “If it meant something when I kissed you, could we do it again?”
His eyes went from round nickels to half-moons to almond slivers in a matter of a few breaths.
She rose up from the couch and his energy did the same thing it had done in the kitchen last night. It went from a mad, swirling storm cloud to a slow-motion tumble, everything just a touch away from being frozen in time.
“No,” she said. “On second thought, don’t answer that. Let me make this really clear. Ty, it was special. I want to do it again.”
“Special,” he murmured, his eyes locked on hers, his expression completely bemused.
“Would you like some proof?”
“I—” His mouth clapped closed again. “Yes.”
She took a few steps closer to him and by the time she was at the foot of the armchair, she could see the pulse dancing the tango in his throat. His hands were on either of the arms of the chair and his face was tipped up to hers. She could feel his nerves, his reticence, his ever-present confusion. And if she hadn’t felt that zapping lick of hope radiating off of him, she might have stepped back. If she hadn’t felt the words hell yes materialize out of thin air and just known that they were from him, she might have given him his space back.
Mindful of her long legs and the tight squeeze of the two of them in that chair, Fin folded herself sideways onto Tyler’s lap, her eyes bouncing back and forth between his. He wasn’t leaning in, but his arms instantly came around her, one hand sliding up her back, the other making itself at home over top of her knees, hooking her to him.
Their eyes were connected in that time-bending, steel-rope sort of way, and when she leaned forward, so did he. Their eyes stayed linked even when their lips brushed.
“Ouch.”
They leaned back as one, her hand going over her mouth to rub away the zap of static shock that had just sparked between them.
“Why does that keep happening?” he asked.
“I have no idea.”
He narrowed his eyes. “Shit. You’re, like, actually a witch, aren’t you?”
She rolled her eyes at him, laced her fingers in his hair and tugged him forward. This kiss was not tentative. Not exploratory. This kiss had a purpose. Fin wanted Tyler to leave this kiss and know exactly how much she’d meant to kiss him.
She used her mouth to open his mouth and joyfully swallowed the groan of appreciation that reverberated from his chest. Fin flattened a hand over his heart, reveling in the race of his heartbeat, in the rumble of the sounds he was making as she kissed him. He gripped her even tighter against him, and she had a flash of intuition. Ty, she realized, was tactile. She was sure he was just as turned on by visuals as the next guy, but he was also a true toucher. Which was something that was rarer than it seemed. In this day and age of internet porn, it seemed to Fin that most guys were more into the visuals of sex than how it actually felt. All the popular sex positions these days had minimal body contact, people just kind of forking each other, their only contact being between their tines.
But not Ty. She knew without even having slept with him, just from this kiss. He momentarily stopped to shift her higher on his lap, to nuzzle his nose under her chin, to smooth her ponytail down over her back.
When they kissed again, it was just as needy, but somehow even softer. She felt every swipe of his palm over her thigh, every rough adjustment of his forearm over her back, the tight set of their bodies against one another. All of it was heating her up. But in a languid way. Like the difference between heating butter in the microwave and setting it out to warm in the sun.
Her neck was cricking, kissing him sideways like that, so she reared back and swung a leg over his hip, straddling him and facing him head-on. He automatically widened the set of his knees and had her fitting even more snugly against him. She smiled at him smugly, but he leaned forward and kissed the smile right off of her mouth.
This kiss had been meant to knock his socks off, to clear up some of his confusion, but she hadn’t quite calculated for just how good of a kisser Tyler was. She’d never, in her life, been kissed like this. Him bending her slightly backward, cradling her head in one hand, taking her weight so that all she had to do was open wide and receive him.
And receive him she did. He was a tongue kisser for sure. But not in that tone-deaf, domineering way that so many guys were. He wasn’t invading her mouth, planting a flag, taking. No. He was tasting her. Warming her. And, she had to admit as she lunged up and didn’t let him retreat, he was opening her right up.
CHAPTER TWENTY
FIN OUTRIGHT LAUGHED when she came back from the bathroom. Tyler supposed he must look ridiculous. He knew his hair was a mess, his sweater tugged to one side and the expression on his face could only read: stupefied.
He leaned against her kitchen counter, one hand covering the bottom half of his face while his eyes rested on the takeout menus she’d fanned out for him to choose from. But he didn’t see a thing. He was still stuck in the land of twenty minutes ago when she’d been straddled across his lap, his hands lost on the oasis of her body, her heat grinding desperately into his aching lap, her mouth taking and giving, remaking him into a different person.
Even though it had just been kissing, Tyler felt different. Very different.
He felt newly hatched. Like a very nearly middle-aged man who’d just pecked his way out of a shell he hadn’t known he’d been wearing.
“I feel like I just woke up from a coma,” he told her when she leaned against the kitchen door and just stared at him from across the room, that goofy smile on her face.
“No luck on choosing takeout, then?”
“I’m pretty sure I left my ability to read somewhere in your mouth.”
She laughed again. “Feeling a little befuddled, Ty?”
He dragged a hand over his face, hearing the scrape of his late-afternoon stubble. “And you’re not?” He’d seen her face when they’d realized it was time to peel themselves off of one another. They’d both known that, at that point, it was either strip down or get up. Tyler hadn’t been sure his blood pressure was ready for the strip-down option yet. They’d both opted for ordering some takeout and seeing where the rest of the evening led them. Either way, she’d been dozy-eyed and exhilarated and just as baffled as he’d been.
She smiled at him, light eyes through dark eyelashes, one of her fingers tracing her lips. “I’m definitely...something.”
“Come over here,” he told her and was downright shocked when she listened. He’d fully expected her to argue, to get him to come to her, which he totally would have done. On his knees. Over rusty nails. But instead she sauntered on those long, long legs across the kitchen, her palm skimming over the tops of her indoor herb garden as she walked past, her eyes pinned to his.
He gulped. Luckily, his body knew what to do. The second she got close enough, he reached out and caught her by the waist, tipped her weight forward so that her hips knocked into his, her soft chest sinking forward into his rib cage. He laced their fingers together on both hands and something caught his attention.
“You’re not wearing any of your jewelry.” Now that he was really looking, it was strange to see her without it, like the bejeweled tiger had decided to take off her stripes for a while.
“I usually don’t when I’m at home.”
“I thought jewelry wearers generally wore their things all the time. Bed, the shower, that kind of thing.”
She shrugged her shoulders. “Maybe some do, but I don’t wear my jewelry absently. I wear it with a lot of purpose. Meaning. And that meaning usually goes away when I’m at home.”
“You mean you wear it for protection when you’re out of the house?”
“Sometimes.” She nodded. “Or for
courage, or creativity, or luck. Mostly, it just helps me to interface with the world. I know which crystals I’m wearing, what they’re purported to be good for, and it helps me put my best foot forward. But when I’m at home—”
“There’s no world to interface with.”
“Exactly.”
He lifted her hand and absently kissed her palm. “If you’d known I was coming would you have worn some?”
“Definitely.”
He caught her eyes and was pleased to see her looking lazily aroused by the sight of him kissing up her wrist, making tracks toward her elbow. “What would you have worn?”
She considered his question with a solemnity that made her look momentarily regal. “I have a necklace with a spirit quartz pendant I might have put on.”
“What does spirit quartz do?”
“Protects innocent women from scoundrels.”
He stopped midkiss at her elbow and quirked her a look. “Is that right?”
She laughed. “No. But it banishes fear.”
He stopped kissing her then, and for a moment, just nuzzled his stubble against her inner arm. He let her hand drop and laced his fingers around her waist. Her stare was always intense, with those icy-light eyes and that unblinking intake thing she did. But he was starting to be able to read the nuance there. If he looked, really looked, he could just sense the edges of her vulnerability. She could have just made a joke about what the crystal did. She didn’t have to answer the question honestly, but she had.
“Fear?” he asked gently. “Am I scary, Fin?”
“Am I?” she asked, arching that emoji eyebrow.
“Good point,” he conceded. But his mind was chewing over her admission and it was important to him to clear something up. “Fin... I hope what you mean is that me, as a concept, is scary. Not me as a man. As the person standing in front of you.” She opened her mouth but he pressed one finger there for one moment, needing to finish. “Because I know that you’ve had to grow all sorts of weapons and armor just to be able to live your life in peace, and I hate that. I hate that for you. I wish it weren’t true. And I guess I just want you to know that if you ask me to leave, I’ll go. Simple as that. You don’t have to shove me away. I’m not going to push you, Fin. I’m going to listen. If you talk, I’ll listen.”
